As Good As You Get
by Penglaive
Summary: In their final days, Light and Wily build androids that redefine the limits of robotics, but even as these masterpieces usher in a new era, echoes of the past remain. Human hands can only craft what human minds can understand, and even hearts made from the most carefully etched silicon can't escape the model they were based on.
1. Love

Disclaimer: Last I checked, I'm not the owner of Capcom, so I don't own Megaman. I'm just tinkering with some bits and pieces.

Names: I'm using the English names, but Megaman was originally Rockman and Protoman was called Blues in the Japanese version.

Formatting: "Spoken words are in quotes." _Internal character thoughts are in italics._

* * *

**Love**

It's not an emotion that a regular robot can feel. Despite his many heroic actions and advanced upgrades, Megaman knows that he's just a regular robot, a well designed lab assistant built with an ingenious tool copying system and an unfailing desire to help. Whether it was busting misbehaving bots or making a quick dive to catch a precious falling test tube, Mega was exactly as happy to hear, afterwards, "Good job, my boy. You've really saved us this time."

That's not to say the simple pleasure of accomplishment was all that motivated him. No, his programming went deeper than that, which was what allowed him to feel this warm, gentle vibration through his core when returning Dr. Light's familiar, approving gaze. It was a feeling that had, to him, no equal in all the realm of experience, though he knew it wasn't love. Not quite.

Still, when he tends the grounds and puts flowers on that quiet grave, there are these stubborn little distress signals shooting through his mechanical brain that simply refuse to shut off. He knows, intellectually, that this pain is not refined to the level of true human grief, though how can he really understand the difference, when he's never experienced the other side? He only knows that he feels pressed down, made low, and he supposes it is not so much sorrow as a winding down of the purpose that had always animated his life: _help out_.

Perhaps, to a robot, sadness was simply a consequence of failing to meet an objective: _I cannot help you if you are dead._

It distinctly bothers him, though, that there will be no more kind, encouraging words, no more surprise upgrades, no gentle old fingers carding fondly through his hair, reminding him that wars and helmets are done and over with. Dr. Light is not the only one he misses, either. Protoman, his fatally flawed power source having finally given out, has also been reduced to a mere sinking feeling in Megaman's chest. Roll and Rush, having no one to perform necessary maintenance and indeed, no one to perform for, have shut down, as well. Megaman would shut himself down, too, except...

_I cannot help if I am dead._

_...But I am dying_.

He is, slowly, so slowly that human eyes would not be able to detect the progression, but the years have been hard on him. Although there is peace now, the fighting extracted a toll he's not done paying for. Yet being a robot with only the most unrefined of emotions, he does not know exactly how to grieve for that, and so he does not try.

He simply lets himself wind down.

He could find someone else to help repair him, he supposes. Let some stranger open him up and poke around, try to figure his systems out. Somehow, perhaps because of a logic error due to lack of proper maintenance, he does not want to allow that. He wants to protect his precious hardware system, which Dr. Light built with such loving care, from cold fingers and carelessly prying eyes. He wants to protect that other one, too, for Dr. Light and for the future.

So that's where he goes, every time he leaves the grave: to the capsule.

He likes to look in on him, the next generation, every piece of him crafted with painstaking care: the true love and faith of a courageously optimistic father. Megaman knows, suddenly, that someone in the future will have to open this precious child up, to poke and pry and prod at him, to figure out the mysteries of his carefully crafted systems. He hopes those fingers will be kind.

He presses his own hand to the viewport.

_My little brother._

He may be an old model now, but Megaman wonders, he wonders, because Dr. Light programmed him to think for himself as much as possible...

There is a specially designed hook up, so that he can connect to check on the mental processes of the deeply sleeping boy, whose incredibly sophisticated mechanical mind is trying to form itself into something stable, to integrate so much emotional potential with such incredibly complex logical circuitry. Megaman knows he will never be as advanced as that, but he's been around for a long time, had a chance to learn to think and feel so many different things, even if they aren't very many layers deep. He wonders if maybe he could lend a hand?

It can't even be properly called a decision, when it's written on the core of him: _help out._

And so he hooks up, because he has years, yet, before he'll need to shut down, especially if he just sits here, quiet and still. Megaman closes his eyes next to the sleeper, and he dreams, dreams of bunsen burners and new siblings and warm fingers in his hair.

This is what robot dreams are made of: warm, gentle vibrations.


	2. Hate

**Hate**

Zero isn't ever intended to love, though Wily has found, to his madly cackling dismay, that the android must be designed to be able to. That's because Wily built him be his legacy, to carry on his hatred after his death, and what is hate but love's bitter opposite—its ultimate rejection? Zero will have to have the capacity to achieve the undying depth of feeling that goes with either side of the coin.

Wily's only ever found use for the one side, though, so he knows the dual capacity is just a waste. If only he could find a way to craft hatred more elegantly, without the useless reciprocal part! Hate is too complex a thing, though, to simply be distilled down and dissected up, and so Wily has to console himself with the fact that Zero is not programmed to pick up useless things. He's good at figuring out intricate concepts, though, and so Wily knows that as long as he supplies the rudiments, the world will quickly provide the education necessary for his creation to learn hatred, just as that "education" was supplied to Wily himself, so long ago.

_Undeserving fools_—_always stealing my spot light!_

What had taught Wily the deepest hatred, though, beyond even Megaman's obnoxious, shallow naivete or Light's pompous, outward seeming nobility, was the deep and brutal _unfairness _of life, that he has schemed and built so frantically, struggled so hard, gotten knocked down so mercilessly, only to have to claw his way back up again and again and again, and yet Light, spineless little worm that he is, can simply sit back, sedate and serene, and watch peacefully while all the world's acknowledgement flows to him.

_Why, why should the world adore __**him**__?_

Doesn't Wily put in much more desperate effort? Isn't he even more wickedly clever? But as the grip of advancing age comes clawing deeper into his remaining hours, so too comes the realization that he might not have time to win on brilliant rage alone. Oh, how it galls him to think that he couldn't grasp victory with just the wild, vengeful force of his will!

In the pit of his wretched heart, though, he knows he needs to come up with some ingenius way to bridge the gap that has always existed between him and his rival, a way to take those who walk so proudly in light and drag them down into his own consuming darkness. And so the Virus is born, as a spike of demented inspiration inside his fermenting mind: because if Zero has to be built with the capacity to love, then surely Light's new creation has to be built with the capacity to hate?

Of course, there is an implicit betrayal in giving birth to another legacy, because in choosing to split his time between Zero and the Virus, he is already telling his one-of-a-kind creation, capable of such subtleties of human emotion, exactly how little real faith he had in him. But cheating, backstabbing selfishness is so much a part of Wily's personality by then, spidered so deeply through every part of his soul, that it isn't even a conscious decision anymore. Besides which, Wily loves being unfair himself, and in that way, the Virus is so insidiously appealing. He can design it to feed off of the massive, pre-existing injustice of the world in order to instill the intent for evil, without being forced to supply the capacity for anything good to offset it at all.

In a way, it is the most poetic revenge. As the world has rejected his views, so he will force them to reject their own.

Still, a Virus doesn't have legs, can't properly predict and control if it can't understand the full range of motivations of others, so Zero is still needed to be the orchestrator of the final downfall of Light's legacy, to be the representative of all the hatred and bitterness of Wily's past failures, the cruel knife that twists his vengeance in, as well as the witness that records the despairing surrender of the world to Wily's will, even if that comes only long after he is dead.

That mission makes the android terribly important to him, and fickle as his whims are, Wily has worked so very hard on Zero for so very long, struggled to make him precise, brainstormed to make him strong, and frantically programmed to make him clever. As a scientist with a more than healthy inclination toward schadenfreude, he has looked down at the power readouts and practically drooled in anticipation of the destruction this amazing, terrible creation will cause. Zero will be his vindication, the thing that will prove his life worthwhile, and against the creeping mortal fear of death and dissolution (Wily is beginning to feel so very, very old), there is a powerful, instinctive urge to connect, to pass a piece of himself on to something young and strong and new.

Zero might be something like a son to him, a being he could share his inner thoughts with and solemnly entrust his legacy to, and even as Wily works on the Virus, he still goes back to test, to tweak, to optimize. There are these odd moments, like when he finishes attaching Zero's high tension, anti-tangle hair filaments, where Wily looks down at his creation, at the perfectly designed lines of his (for now) peacefully resting face, and for just a few seconds in time, he feels this strangely paternal urge to smooth down a strand of new made hair or clasp those limp, gently curled fingers in his own.

The difference between Light and Wily is that ultimately, Wily never did reach out.

Perhaps that is because even as he arrogantly rambles on about his upcoming triumph to an audience of faceless robot drones, there is this tiny, horrible little voice inside his head that keeps asking, _Do you really think you can craft perfection when you're such a sniveling failure, yourself?_

_No, no more of that! No more of being second rate!_ Wily thinks furiously in return, his mind twisting with the hissing, seething poison of inferiority. It is that little spiteful toxin which has made Light's achievements so impossible to endure, and that painful insult to his vast but fragile pride is the true seed of his hatred. Yes, Zero will learn to hate, Wily is sure. _It is so easy._

Even Wily's own creations are not spared his incidious rancor, for how can he bear to see his grotesque flaws reflected back at him? Or if not—those few times he has succeeded in creating something truly greater than himself—the burning jealousy nearly eats him alive, because no matter how skilled or powerful the products of his genius are, they can't make the man himself what he wants to be. Because Wily has never been able to see past his own problems, the pervasive selfishness of his mind swiftly reduces Zero, his final masterwork of engineering and near limitless potential, to just another tool in an endless war.

In those dark days before death, what Wily really thinks is: _you're worthless anyway, and I can't really expect you to actually make me proud, but don't you dare fail me._

It is only with a cold, embittered vengefulness that the rogue roboticist finally manages to finish programming Zero's incredibly complex core, his last efforts performed under the mantra of one who is both scathingly disheartened and too furious to let go, desperate only to manage some retribution, some balancing of the cosmic scales, at the end: _give as good as you get_. Since life has only delivered Wily wrath and despair...

Somehow, he never sees his own culpability in the vicious cycle he is trapped in, and so it never occurs to Wily that he might be creating some of his own problems. Zero isn't programmed to reciprocate what he never receives, but when has Wily ever given any loyalty?

Perhaps that is why Dr. Light will always be remembered as the superior genius. While neither of them has ever lacked for cleverness, Light alone has learned how to give and thereby come to realize, as Wily never will, that even as he is capable of hate, he is also capable of something so much better. Far more than Megaman, it is Wily's own vicious, short-sighted blindness which has bested him, for even as he wishes so desperately to be acknowledged, he looks down at a creature fully capable of warmth and fury, hope and awe and pain and joy, of hatred and of love—and still sees only a chariot for the world's destruction.

But that is exactly who Wily is, and he is nothing if not stubborn. Even up to the very end, he throws all his genius into a violent challenge for the fate of the planet, aware only that he can't afford any more of those almosts, those half-steps too little, those faltering traps too late, that have so far left Light the total victor in life and in legacy.

_You will be my masterpiece, Zero, because you must be! You will bring my vengeance to all of his creations!_

But unfortunately, for some reason, the few times Wily partially activates him, the android showes himself to be both aggressive and disobedient. (And where could he have possibly picked up that baseless fury and disloyalty? Children, these days.) Wily uses so little of his own heart, it never occurrs to him that giving a creature all the tender subtleties of human emotion and then subsequently asking it to mindlessly destroy might not have been a combination destined for success. As it is, he sees Zero's overstressed behavior only as a sign that he will be an unhesitating killer, to exceed even the wildest expectations.

Therefore, Wily decides that it doesn't really matter if he can control Zero completely or not. By the time Light's own sealed creation awakes, both scientists will be long gone, but Zero will still be a perfectly preserved weapon, ready to destroy what Light has wrought once and for all. But just to be sure, just to be doubly, underhandedly sure, Wily infects Zero with the Virus before storing him away, programming it to leap into Light's new creation whenever they inevitably fight.

Everyone deserves a chance to learn hatred, after all, and it never hurts to have a backup trap.

* * *

Naming notes:** "**Reploid" is a portmanteau word, a word created from the combination of the two words "replica" and "android". It is used to describe the androids created based on the design of android X, after Dr. Cain discovers him (in the timeline of Megaman X). Therefore, using the word Reploid in this chapter would be an anachronism, as well as technically incorrect. Neither X (he is the original) nor Zero (he is Wily's creation) are reproductions of X, so neither is technically a Reploid. They would be androids (Robot Masters), according to their creators.


	3. Waking Up

When Dr. Light's last, best creation awoke, so many decades past the intended date, the external backup battery had long since failed, and he had no remaining conscious memories. Still, he had this creeping awareness that there was no one connected to him, that he was all alone.

This brought a sinking feeling to his chest.

But then the capsule hatch opened, and there was so much sound spilling in, suddenly, that he couldn't make anything out for all the different threads of it running together. Just when he thought he might be able to get a handle on the auditory processing, this foreign object reached in to his visual field, five short protuberances on a flattened, dirt smeared base. The fingers twitched, and he recognized it as a hand. A hand, reaching in to help him.

_Help out._

Suddenly, some ingrained part of his personality clicked into place, and he was reaching back. Just before their fingers touched, though, that hand drew back and disappeared outside the limited range his newly booted optics system could focus on. That sinking feeling in his chest got worse, along with a sudden tightness, and his breath caught in his throat. The world seemed to slow, and he was in pain, being left all alone like this.

_This is sadness._ He did not know how he knew.

Before he could think about it, though, that hand was back, different than before, smoother and slimmer, though still wrinkled, and suddenly not dirty. His logic processors come fully on line.

_Glove, he was wearing a work glove, and he took it off._

Their grimy covering removed, those fingers were a clean, healthy pink.

This time, their hands successfully meet, and newly awakened thermo sensors rejoiced: the hand was warm.

The first day was full of discoveries like that. The first week put his undeveloped verbal skills severely to the test, as he tried to explain to others who he was and how he was made when he didn't really know himself. The rest of the first month was spent learning fine motor control and the immediately pertinent basics of robotics. By the time the season was just beginning to change, Dr. Cain finally let him start helping to assemble the new models. Here, his careful diligence showed its worth, as he was always very precise about his work, in a way that a human would be hard pressed to duplicate.

In fact, not so many days after Dr. Cain had last reminded "X"—for that was what he was called, now—that he had to be very careful, the good doctor allowed himself to get distracted and bump into a partially completed assembly. The fragile new emotion chip he'd balanced precariously at the edge might have smashed if not for X's quick dive to save it.

"My goodness! Thank you, X. I'm beginning to wonder how I ever managed to get by without you!" Those warm fingers ruffled his hair affectionately, Dr. Cain's eyes those of a doting grandfather.

As the year progressed, X learned there were so many layers to joy: the magnetic draw of jovial eyes, that special buoyancy under his reinforced ribs from a sincere compliment, the helplessly strong reciprocal upward tug on the corners of his lips—a pleasant tingling at his scalp where those gentle fingers touched. He began to feel this warm, feathery upswelling of sensation when Dr. Cain made time in his day for him, a feeling which had no equal even in his widely expanding realm of experience.

That still wasn't real love, of course, not yet, because the real thing has so many more layers to it. But it was a beginning, and Cain had always wanted to be a father.

X has always wanted to help out, and there was plenty of time for his feelings to grow.


	4. Broken Things

Naming Notes: I'm using the English names, but Mavericks (malfunctioning androids) were originally called Irregulars in the Japanese version.

* * *

Wily had never been good at planning for contingencies, too impatient, too focused on the straightest path to his goal to see anything else, so the thought that Dr. Light's creation might not wake up on schedule hadn't really occurred to him. Consequently, the pod wasn't set to open and fully awaken Zero until the proximity of an android with Dr. Light's distinctive design signature was detected, even though his deep hibernation routine had only been programmed to run for a maximum of thirty years. Which meant that thirty years into his long, lonely sleep, Zero's central processor became minimally active.

He began to dream.

There was no soft blanket to slip across his chest, suggesting comfort, nor any gentle air currents against his skin to place him in mind of flying. No gentle voices reached his ears; no older siblings touched his heart. The only source of stimulus in what had become his sensory deprivation chamber was the Virus itself, whispering of things to come, of fire and blood and a darkness that would steal over all.

At the beginning, the resulting hostile thoughts were directed outward, toward the world he did not yet know, but as months turned into years turned into decades, the Virus's hunger grew, no longer satisfied with the meager imaginings of an unknowing, less than half activated mind. Its increasing demand for something more real, something visceral, could only be met one way: Zero had nothing to offer except himself.

This is what virus dreams are made of: hunger and destruction and pain.

Processing in such a minimally active state was slow, of course, so those viciously sharp nightmare teeth turned inward only one degree at a time, the significance lost on a slumbering mind, until that desperate hunger began to tear insidiously, in flashes of stop gap footage, through what should have been the most sheltered growing area of a new personality. Hope was stripped into mindless horror, his every calculation unbalanced by vicious addition. Subconscious musings on the future turned to dripping thoughts of self-evisceration.

Zero would have screamed, if he could, but he was trapped in suspended animation, a silent prisoner in his own mind.

Twenty years from the start of the inescapable nightmare, the last of his higher level logical processing subunits finally went through a protective shut down: utterly unable to cope, Zero had become, effectively, as irrationally one dimensional as his own creator. He had been built to be resilient, though, and his lower level pseudo-limbic processes expertly rode the crest of the Virus' high, even as it feasted on him, a stunted mind swallowed up by a hunger that took and took and was never satisfied.

It would be years more before anyone disturbed his capsule. By that time, Zero—if he could properly be called Zero anymore—had gone stark, raving mad.

In perhaps the only spot of luck in his unfortunate existence, the proximity sensor set up to search for Dr. Light's final opus, like everything else Wily had ever built, was stubborn, ridiculously overpowered and prone to jumping to false conclusions. Even after so long, it still had the strength to remain active, as well as the flawed logic to mistake a mere Reploid—a simple replica android—for Dr. Light's original creation.

The startup sequence that was initiated should have brought higher level logical and executive subsystems back online. Half-way through activation, however, invalid internal parameters, the Virus' legacy, brought the whole finely coordinated sequence crashing back down. Cascading reboots never got Zero past the most minimal level of functioning, his system finally shunting into a "safe mode" that was truly anything but "safe".

When the thing that should have been Zero finally opened its eyes, there was only the last echo of a ruined mind still present, threads running randomly through each other and processes accessing stale memory space, false assertions sending them crashing down into themselves. So he was gasping and grasping and laughing by turns, senseless, as he stumbled up out of his long, terrible sleep, newborn movements shaky and faltering. His circuitry was a masterwork, though, and his tactical situational awareness center was soon stuttering back on line.

The thing that should be Zero looked up.

"Ah, I should have known it," the creature in front of him said, aiming a kick at—the pod, the container?—he was laying in. "Maverick. It would have been nice to recover something actually useful in all this junk, but what can I expect from an ancient dump like this?"

The newly woken creature could see a bag labeled "Scrap Recovery Services" just beyond where the talking metal thing stood, pieces and parts—legs and arms—sticking out. He remembered phantom fingers in that long, hazy, in between time, nipped by sharp nightmare teeth into finely measured sections…

And where was he? _Dirty, collapsing place…_ Outside, and inside. He searched through corrupted memory banks for information on the fallen table, the sagging ceiling, and the broken shell he lay in, but it wasn't until he saw the faded sign—W—that he realized: _this is my home_. Higher level logical processing struggled to stay on line just long enough to remind him: the table was the place where he'd been born, the bag of scrap—_my brothers!_

When the nearly crippled executive processes tried to activate protective routines long ago overrun by the Virus, though, the resulting access violation brought any shred of coherency crashing down.

"Well, I guess I'll just shut you down," the metal thing in front of him said, heaving a discontented sigh with a disgusted quirk of its mouth. "Maybe some parts are still at least usable."

_Bone digger, grave robber…_ Flashes of severed limbs and leaking transmission fluid flashed through his head, and the switch to a high alert system state sent all of his subprocessors frantically competing against each other on the main system bus, the resulting traffic hissing and crashing like so much static noise, the hold of the Virus whipping it into a higher crescendo.

The creature reached out toward him, toward his neck—_attempt to deactivate: THREAT! _Low level survival mechanisms finally kicked in, and somehow, amidst the cascading subsystem crashes, his hand managed to reach out and catch that invading arm.

"Hey! What do you think you're doing! Let go!"

The Virus quickly spread deeper into the newly activated physical control systems, and titanium alloy fingers only clenched down harder on that offensive wrist, the fragile points of articulation beginning to give way under the pressure. For the first time since he'd awoken, facial conduction circuits produced some activity. His smile, thought small, was nevertheless enough to show teeth.

"Ow!" the creature cried, wrenching away. "I was just going to turn you off, peaceful like—not like you're working anyway! But since you went and got all obstinate, I'm calling in the Hunters!" The creature smirked. "You'll be nothing _but_ scrap metal when they get done with you!"

"Hun-ters…?" he stammered, vocal systems only partially running, as the Virus attempted to slip into verbal subroutines, as well.

"Oh, you can talk?" Another angry, satisfied smile, as the creature cradled it's injured wrist. "Yeah, the Maverick Hunters. They hunt broken things like you that need to be put down."

Somewhere, there might have been an executive system crying out for the sanctity of his crumbling home, the safety of his broken family…

But the Virus had too great a hold on him to allow anything to preempt it, although it was more than willing to punish the unfairness of the situation. The thing that should be Zero stood and took a menacing step forward, unfamiliar legs quaking on malfunctioning servomechanisms. Belatedly realizing his own vulnerability, the soon-to-be victim turned to flee, scrambling up a rope suspended from a small hole in the slanted sub-basement ceiling. _Foolish thing_. It thought because it pulled the rope up, it was safe to stop and call for—

That word wasn't in his database.

No matter. Soon, the word wouldn't be in the ignorant metal creature's database, either, because its data storage unit was going to be reduced to a tiny pile of shavings.

The Virus' carrier leapt like a thing possessed, for that was what he had become, his reckless bid to catch his prey bringing down the aging ceiling and thereby crushing the last reminders of his identity beneath a ton of concrete. That was okay. The Virus assured him he didn't need anything beyond being The Destroyer, Omega: the end of everything, and since the ceiling had collapsed around him, all he had to do was dig himself out of the rubble and continue stalking. The metal creature was not far away.

Oh, how sweet its fear was! How quickly their roles had reversed, and _it_ was now the one gasping and shaking and gibbering, trying to stumble forward, as if on shaky newborn legs. But things wouldn't be fair, they wouldn't really be fair, until he'd turned the creature into nothing but scrap metal, and the Virus sang at the first real taste of dismemberment, fantasy made real.

It was over all too quickly, though, that nightmarish hunger already casting about for its next meal. Fortunately, there were soon more victims appearing to oblige him, as was his due.

Hunters, they were called. But turnabout was fair play, wasn't it? And so he hunted them.

The Virus gorged itself. In its heady blood lust, perhaps it even shredded a few more moving things, but it was hard to stay aware of that, when it was so busy still shredding his own mind, tearing apart anything that might allow for self-awareness.

Perhaps that was a mercy. The true horror is not in the breaking, after all, but in witnessing what that broken thing has become. At least Zero was spared from seeing the product of his own madness first hand.

But there would come a moment when the Virus would not be there to shield him anymore. That moment was foreshadowed by the commotion outside the crumbling building he currently found himself in, as someone called Sigma was joyously hailed by the ants who refused to come in and play.

The one called Sigma—oh, _he_ was fun to play with. The Virus actually had to commandeer some higher level functions, because while it was clearly winnable, this was not going to be an easy fight. Sigma, unlike others, was intelligently tactical, startlingly brave, and incredibly strong…

Even as Wily's champion brought him to the ground, there were still enough basic parameters matching up that a buried viral subroutine was triggered.

_Initiate transfer protocol…_

The Virus was suddenly pulling out of his systems, systems that were so crippled and disorganized as to be nonoperational without it, the sick pulse of its hunger having been all that was keeping his corrupted subsystems synchronized. In its absence, it left only that unending horror, that scream of a ruined mind, his tactical combat subsystem desperately insisting on only a quick, partial reboot, even as that was clearly so far from enough.

He clutched his head, and for the first time since the nightmare had started, Zero screamed.

Sigma's fist, smashing through the crystal on the front of his helmet and knocking him out, was probably the greatest mercy he had ever been done.


	5. Database Error

The second time Zero woke up after his long sleep, it was to the kindly face of a man dressed in a white lab coat.

_Human_… There was this little nagging sensation in the back of his mind, as if he'd forgotten something he was supposed to be doing.

"It worked! I can't believe it—but wiping those corrupted data banks did the trick! A pity that means we've wiped out all prior history, but…" The man leaned in, until they were practically nose to nose.

"Can you hear me?"

"…hear…you…" Zero whispered, his volume modulation vocal subroutines thrown off because he wasn't yet receiving proper feedback from his auditory processing center.

"Excellent! Excellent! You're well on your way to recovery!"

"Re…cover..y…?"

"Yes, you were quite damaged, I'm afraid. You won't remember this, but you are a very old android—your parts carbon date to nearly the same time as X's! It's magnificent, the intricate level of technology you were built with—but it seems like you were shut away for a long time. I dare say, after so many years without any proper maintenance, something in your systems must have gone severely haywire." The man shook his head sadly. "Thank goodness Sigma was able to bring you in."

_Sigma_. There was something oddly familiar about that name, like the ghost of a memory lingered over deleted files. "Who is he?"

"He's my greatest creation and the leader of the Maverick Hunters," the human declared proudly, "a group that handles Reploids who have dangerously malfunctioned."

"Reploids?" That word wasn't in his database.

"Replica androids, though I suppose that term doesn't really apply to you, does it? I'm an archeologist by trade, and on my last dig I found an extremely advanced android, called X. Because I saw his enormous potential, I built many replica androids based on his design. But you, your design is clearly different, though its obviously at the same technological level as X's. That's why I had to see if I could repair you—you are an engineering marvel!"

Zero blinked. "A marvel?" _You're worthless anyway_, a cruel little voice hissed inside his head, but it was gone before he could trace down the source.

"Yes, though unfortunately, that means I don't understand your systems well enough to know if you're truly fixed or not. That's why you'll have to stay here for testing for a while—after what happened, well, we can't afford to have you running wild like that again. I'm afraid almost every Repoid you got your hands on is completely beyond repair; even Sigma suffered extensive damage."

"I…destroyed?" Somehow, that sounded familiar, too.

"Yes," the man said sadly, sighing. "I just don't have the skill to repair them."

"You repaired me?"

"Well, you are a bit more resilient, apparently," the man replied modestly.

Zero was quiet for a moment. "I was repaired, but they were destroyed. That's…" _Unfair_, his mind supplied, and there was this sharp, terrible sinking sensation in his chest. He didn't recognize it. The moment of self-hatred that followed after it, though—that, he thought he knew. Hatred was so easy to learn.

He had only a moment to sink into the bitterness before his higher level processing came back online, though, and he suddenly found himself declaring, "I have to become a Maverick Hunter."

"That's—where did you get that idea come from? Perhaps your logic module is still malfunctioning…"

"No!" Zero said, his sharp word stopping the man in mid-motion, which was a very good thing, as he had been lifting his hand, as if to reach for the emergency shutdown switch. "It's…to make things fair. I destroyed them, and I was repaired and not them, so I have to take their place."

The man blinked. "Well, I'll be… I couldn't even find it, but it seems your morality module is working after all! Yes, yes, at this rate, I think you _will_ make a full recovery!"

Zero blinked. _Morality…?_ That word wasn't in his database, either.

As it turned out, there were a lot of important words missing from Zero's database, though Dr. Cain reassured him that it was probably just a side effect of the data wipe that had been performed to clear out a corrupted part of his system.

As it was, it took him weeks just to relearn the basics of the way the world worked, picking up new vocabulary along the way, improving and improving until he almost sort of knew what he was doing. Still, it was a shock when, one day, Sigma said to him: "Thanks for helping out with the new recruits, Zero."

_Helping out?_ He was still encountering phrases that weren't in his database, and he was not really sure yet what "thanks" were, either. He was learning, though, and even if his history was a blank and his personality was flat and withdrawn, at least he was doing well at everything combat related. Then, one day...

"Excellent maneuvering, Zero. Your quick reaction really saved the team, this time," Sigma commended him, and for the first time ever, his fellow Hunters actually looked accepting, smiling and thumping him companionably on the back. Suddenly there was this, this—something, warm and gentle inside his chest, as if something were vibrating very softly within his core.

Zero had no clue what that was about, because apparently that sort of knowledge had been flagged as non-essential and thus been deleted during the system recovery wipe. But luckily for the Maverick Hunters, Zero had come hard coded with excellent basic instincts, and so he heard, more and more often, things like:

"You're an incredible asset to the team."

"I knew I could count on you!"

"You rescued them! Great job."

Then, of course there was: "Thank you, Zero." X had told him that, so many times. Zero wasn't even sure why—all he did was explain the most basic principles of combat and occasionally covered the blue android when he got in over his head. But when X looked at him with such warmth and gratitude…

Zero could feel something down in the depth of his core, like a starving fire had finally been fed enough to flicker back to life inside him. That was the only thing, really, that got him through Sigma's betrayal. That, and the solemn, vicious stubbornness that told him to retaliate, to not take anything lying down.

He was going to give as good as he got—he was designed to. So the Maverick Wars dragged on, neither side quite able to strike a killing blow. But in between the fighting and the dying and Iris' vital fluids all over his hands (and the screaming, there had been screaming, then), there were these moments, these little stills in time that kept him sane: a shared, triumphant smile on their return, two sets of bored eyes meeting and rolling while some minor bureaucrat droned on obliviously about their accomplishments, a short laugh before a pair of battle ready Hunters headed out on a mission again…

Even the things that shouldn't feel comforting somehow took on a different aspect when X was around. Although Zero's recording capacity had been severely degraded at the time, the blond android could distinctly remember how X cradled his failing body, that first time Zero had used his self-destruct—he still couldn't adequately explain what failure of sensory input had made X's titanium fingers and bulky, armored limbs feel so soft, so unerringly gentle then. To be honest, there were an awful lot of things Zero couldn't seem to figure out, no matter how much he thought on them, because there was simply so much to it, to this connection—that they could challenge each other and support each other and laugh for each other and bleed dry for each other all in the same day. Protectors and rivals and resurrectors and even eulogy writers, should the worst come to pass, layer upon layer upon layer, and Zero didn't understand what was at the heart of it all.

He did know that they were best friends, though, and Zero would do anything for X—kill for him, die for him, even, though it was desperately hard, try to live well for him—because he knew X would do the same in return. In the depths of his central processor, though, Zero was secretly afraid of who had flagged his ethics data non-essential, of how Sigma first caught the Virus, and of what that little nagging objective might have been that he'd woken up without memory of in Dr. Cain's lab. Zero was afraid to feel because every good thing had its opposite, and he didn't properly trust himself not to be desperately bad at friendship (there were _still _so many words missing from his database).

All he could be certain of was that even when he was so far past the extremes of weariness, when he was in agony, his entire body twisted and broken, still, when X called to him and begged him not to die, he suddenly wanted to hold on for that moment when his systems rebooted and X smiled at him, so wide, the corners of his mouth stealing up as if the laws of physics and gravity had slipped their hold upon his face.

There was something almost hypnotic in the intensity of that sort of joy, along with the answering lightness in his chest, like waves of vibrations layered over each other, resonating into a soft, downy warmth. Zero didn't know what this feeling was, really, but that was okay. Databases could be filled in. As long as he kept coming back for X, he'd have plenty of time to learn, and it wasn't even really a choice anymore, when it was writ there at the core of him: _give as good as you get_.

Zero is nothing if not stubborn, so he will.


End file.
